The Internet has become vital to both businesses and consumers. The initial role of the Internet as an information tool has led to explosive adoption of its use; however, the massive growth of the Internet has outpaced the capabilities of its infrastructure. Content providers have moved from providing static information to distributing applications that consume large amounts of bandwidth.
The delivery of high quality service to an end user while maintaining an ability to provide a significant increase in bandwidth over a global reach is an unmet challenge of contemporary communication systems. The public Internet is plagued with user problems such as congestion (too many users) and latency (long pauses and delays) and is, therefore, unable to support an increase in communication network traffic resulting from the presence of additional users and the advent of rich media applications. Deterministic applications include, for example, media rich content, low latency applications, and other applications requiring mission critical delivery scheduling. Several causes of user problems are deliberate off-loading and routing of data traffic through congestion points, inadequate security, and lost information resulting from the currently used best-effort routing practices.
The structural layers of the Internet, which include network providers, service providers, software providers, and content providers, work independently and thereby create an infrastructure based on individual convenience and legacy systems without consideration of the interaction among the constituent participants. Telecommunication carriers have networks optimized for voice but not data. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) oversubscribe their networks in an effort to achieve or sustain profitability. The public Internet is, therefore, a fundamentally flawed model from a financial, business, and technological perspective for the delivery of low latency, high throughput applications, such as media rich content and other deterministic applications.
Moreover, the Internet has a different set of transmission issues from those faced by Local Area Networks (LANs), Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), and Wide Area Networks (WANs). LANs include directories that authorize LAN end-users to use applications or obtain information. The directory is a baseline component of the functionality that comes with LAN connectivity. LANs have historically been more important to businesses than residences because LANs enable enterprise-wide applications. MANs facilitate the interconnection of corporate LANs between buildings in a city as well as enable the interconnection of corporate networks to a WAN for voice and data traffic. They are also the local loop infrastructure that connects end users to the Internet. WANs serve as the backbone for corporations that operate in multiple cities and are the national or global networks that connect the majority of users. Public WANs, which serve as the Internet backbone, have large amounts of available bandwidth; however, no widely used routing system exists that avoids the congestion and best efforts delivery method of today's Internet.
The Internet at numerous points has congestion that results from “peering” and commercially expedient routing policies at the peering points, such as Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAEs), where there is no economic incentive to carry traffic over any particular equipment backbone structure. Peering routing is a consequence of the practice of multiple service providers (SPs) using their routers to exchange information transmission routes with one another. Commercially expedient routing is the practice of an SP choosing a nearest location to transfer applications, irrespective quality of service considerations. Thus, the finite number of available locations for exchanging information becomes overly congested because application routing is motivated by commercial, not quality of service control, considerations.
The Internet operates with end users by way up dial-up modems or LANs connected by an ISP local loop and thereby creates over the LAN a load that typically exceeds the speed capability of the local loop. The consequence is that simple, high capacity bandwidth within the Internet by way of any ISP of rudimentary quality of service is insufficient to create a low latency, deterministic network solution. The demands exerted on infrastructure support required by, for example, 10 million users simultaneously on line from all branches of the Internet currently present a difficult bandwidth load management challenge, which promises to worsen as broadband applications gain popularity and increase in usage.
What is needed, therefore, is a broadband communication system that can consistently deliver deterministic applications, irrespective of network-to-network architecture complications.
The present invention is directed to overcoming, or at least reducing the effects of, one or more of the problems set forth above.